Online advertising may be an important source of revenue for enterprises engaged in electronic commerce. A number of different kinds of page-based online advertisements are currently in use, along with various associated distribution requirements, advertising metrics, and pricing mechanisms. Processes associated with technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enable a page to be configured to contain advertisements.
For a search engine or search website, advertisements may be associated with the search term(s) that is entered. A search term may also be referred to as a keyword or query. Advertisers may be given the option of purchasing various search terms for a fee. When the purchased search terms are entered by a user, the advertiser's ads are shown on the results page for that search term. The fee for a search term may be a fixed rate or may be based on the number of times the search term is used, or be paid based on the number of times the advertisement is viewed or clicked on by a user. Further, current buying and selling of search terms for advertisements may be based on the popularity of the search terms. Accordingly, the price for both buying and selling increases as the popularity of a search term increases. Therefore, it may be beneficial to recognize the fluctuation in popularity of particular search terms.